An ambitious new restaurant is to be launched in Cambridge this autumn under locally born chef Tristan Welch, formerly of Le Gavroche and Pétrus. Parker’s Tavern will be the destination restaurant in the University Arms, a 192-room revamp of the 1834 hotel overlooking Parker’s Piece, a city-centre playing field famous as the birthplace of Association Football, as […]
Michel Roux Jr, from the cooking dynasty that has personified French cuisine in Britain for half a century, is to oversee an establishment serving traditional English food. The Wigmore bar, in Regent Street’s grand Langham hotel, will offer dishes inspired by the English pub and tavern, such as raised veal and ham pie and devilled lamb’s kidneys – although diners will […]
Former Danesford House head chef Adam Simmonds has opened a 12-month pop-up in Soho to test the market ahead of a permanent opening in the capital. Test Kitchen, near Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Frith Street, will be just that – a counter where diners are expected to feed back to chefs on the dishes […]
⦿ Jay Rayner of The Observer reviewed The Other Naughty Piglet, a branch of Brixton’s Naughty Piglets inside Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new theatre in Victoria, The Other Place, where he found “a kind of modern British cooking with wallops of umami”. “Sometimes the cleverness is textural. A pile of white crab meat sits atop a heap of […]
⦿ Marina O’Loughlin of the Guardian reviewed Popolo 8/10 in Shoreditch,”run with utter grace by Jonathan Lawson, [an] ex-Theo Randall chef”. “The main flavour here is Italian classics, flawlessly realised… and dishes that straddle cuisines. Some appear to be the result of a particularly febrile imagination: cool, thick labneh studded with a hectic combination of crisp-shelled fried […]
Le Gavroche, the Roux family flagship and foundation stone of modern London gastronomy, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with a “Back to the Classics” menu of original dishes from 1967. The menu is available until December and costs £90 a head for five courses, bookable in advance, to be shared in the Library […]
(Image credit – Mint Leaf Restaurant) With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, what better time to remind readers of the capital’s top 10 restaurants for romance, as voted for in our annual London restaurant survey: we achieved 7,500 participants in the 2017 survey. The coveted top spots are unchanged from last year, with Clos Maggiore, La Poule […]
Chef Monica Galetti is opening her long-planned first restaurant, Mere, in Fitzrovia on Monday March 6, alongside her sommelier husband, David Galetti. It is named in tribute to her mother, Mary — Mere in Samoan, as well as being French for mother. The Samoan-born chef trained in New Zealand before joining Le Gavroche in 1999, rising […]
Chefs past and present at Le Gavroche are receiving a Christmas bonus this year following Michel Roux Jr’s announcement that he will make up the shortfall owed to underpaid staff members. The payments, thought to be worth tens of thousands of pounds, follow revelations of underpayment at the Mayfair temple of gastronomy that have rumbled on for a […]
Le Gavroche will close for lunch on Tuesdays and bring last orders forward to 9.30pm to reduce working hours following a newspaper report that it paid kitchen staff as little as £5.50 a hour. According to the The Guardian, several chefs at Michel Roux’s gastronomic bastion in Mayfair said they routinely worked between 62 and 68 hours a […]
